Assisting the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is one of ECMWF’s founding objectives and holds an important place in the Centre’s current ten-year Strategy to 2025, with an explicit commitment to support training and capacity building in WMO Member States. This partnership ranges from providing essential data to WMO Members free of charge to supporting fellowships and projects to improve severe weather forecasting in developing countries.

ECMWF relies on WMO for the global exchange of observations, as a prerequisite for all our NWP forecasting activities.

We contribute to the WMO Severe Weather Forecasting Demonstration Project (SWFDP) as a Global Centre. In this project we provide access to our global HRES and ENS products as part of the cascading forecast approach to support national meteorological services in developing and least-developed countries.

We also contribute to WMO committees, working groups and expert teams, especially on issues relating to the World Weather Watch. We support the World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) and in particular we are active members of the DAOS, S2S, PPP and WGNE committees.

ECMWF provides the meteorological community with the ecCodes software in support of the WMO's standard data formats BUFR and GRIB, and it hosts a number of meteorological archives as part of WMO projects.

WMCs provide WMO Members with a range of forecast products based on their global models for both medium-range and seasonal ensemble forecasts. They also provide relevant documentation and verification to demonstrate the quality of their forecasts. This is to assist WMO Members in their official duties at national level.

ECMWF has been the WMO lead centre for deterministic NWP verification for many years. The task of this lead centre is to collect, archive, and display upper-air verification scores from participating global NWP centres. Scores are computed by each centre following the guidelines in WMO Manual 485. Since April 2017, station-based surface scores are being exchanged as well (as described in the updated version of WMO Manual 485) but this has been adopted by few centres so far.

ECMWF is currently the lead centre for upper-air observation monitoring.

The WMO is developing a modernised system of the quality management of the surface-based components of the WMO Integrated Global Observation System (WIGOS). The WDQMS will result in the near-real-time monitoring and identification of observational data quality issues and, if needed, follow-up actions on a station-by-station basis.

ECMWF has been involved from the start of this major initiative (pilot project details were reported in our Newsletter). We are working with the WMO to develop the Quality Monitoring Function of the WDQMS to a pre-operational status and will become the lead WDQMS Quality Management Centre.

ECMWF became the WMO lead centre for wave forecast verification in June 2018 with formal approval at WMO Executive Council EC-70, following recommendations at CBS-16 in November 2016 and at JCOMM-5 in October 2017. Participating centres provide forecasts of wave parameters and 10 m wind speed, and the lead centre computes and publishes scores for these forecasts. The technical implementation is ongoing, with three centres providing forecast data on a regular basis, and several others providing test datasets.

We host an archive of ensemble forecasts from ten global centres to support the WMO TIGGE project. This project seeks to improve high-impact weather forecasts by strengthening international collaboration between operational centres and academia. The forecast data is freely available to all users for research purposes.

We host and manage TIGGE-LAM, an extension of the TIGGE archive that includes weather forecasts from limited-area model (LAM) ensembles, including hosting the web portal to the archive.

ECMWF supports the WMO’s Severe Weather Forecasting Demonstration Project (SWFDP) with state-of-the-art weather forecasts. The SWFDP strengthens the capacity of NMHSs in developing and least developed countries to deliver improved forecasts and warnings of severe weather to save lives, livelihoods and property.

The SWFDP uses the cascading forecasting process, moving high-value information from global prediction centres to regional hubs, and then down to national meteorological centres.

This enables the production of more accurate and timely forecasts and warnings of hydrometeorological hazards. It helps build capacity and expertise in developing countries.

More than 50 countries are currently involved in the SWFDP: in Southern and Eastern Africa, in the Bay of Bengal, Southeast Asia and Central Asia and the Southwest Pacific areas. In 2018 it was extended to West Africa and the Caribbean.

ECMWF contributes to all the SWFDP regional subprojects with dedicated areas on the website which offer easy access to forecast products using the ecCharts framework: